A new wave of shellshocked vets

Some Iraq war veterans are returning home and having trouble coping.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
NEW YORK -- Ten years after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, an army of shellshocked veterans began reporting to homeless shelters.
Now those desperate ranks are being joined by veterans of conflicts where the guns are still blazing -- the Iraq and Afghan wars.
And social workers fear the trickle of stunned soldiers returning from Baghdad and Kabul has the potential to become a tragic tide.
"The Iraq vets are showing up now, and asking for help now," said Yogin Ricardo Singh of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Black Veterans for Social Justice. "What surprises me is how young they are."
Like the Vietnam vets before them, many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. But this time, it's not just the front line troops who are fighting demons.
"In Iraq, everyone was susceptible to roadside bombs, not just the combat troops," said J.B. White, an Iraq vet who runs the HOPE for New Veterans program for the Manhattan-based social service agency Common Ground. "Everybody is exposed to trauma there."
Quick decline
Many of the returning vets said they were surprised how quickly they slid into the streets.
"I was proud to be a Marine, I felt I did my part," said former Sgt. Ralph (R.L.) Marcelle, who served in Tikrit and has been crashing on a friend's couch for several weeks. "I can't believe I'm living like this now."
Also, for the first time, there are women in the ranks of the homeless vets. And some, like a 24-year-old Brooklyn woman who asked to only be identified by her first name, Vanessa, have children.
"When I came home, I had nobody to help me," she said. "I would find myself riding the train all day, staying at the McDonald's all afternoon, trying to waste time. It was hard on my son."
Nationwide, about 1,200 veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have already sought help from homeless-service providers, but only about 200 were "actually homeless," said Peter Dougherty of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"What we are finding through outreach programs are a number of veterans who are living marginally," said Dougherty. "Places like New York, where housing costs are high, can be very tough."
Broken promises
Singh, an Army veteran, said many of the 30 Iraq war vets he's working with are victims of broken promises.
"The Army recruits kids from the poorest neighborhoods and promises to teach them job skills and send them to school," said Singh. "The reality is that for a lot of young people coming out of the service now, all they know how to do is be soldiers."
By the time they arrive at Singh's door, most have exhausted their signing bonuses, gone through their savings and are deeply ashamed.
"Soldiers are not conditioned to ask for help," Singh said. "To them, it's like admitting failure."
Others arrive after having burned bridges with family members who could not handle -- or understand -- why they were falling apart.
"I'd be sitting at a table having dinner and would just start to shake all over," Brooklyn native Henry Gomez, who enlisted in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks and lost his family when he returned home, wrote in a statement for his social worker. "I found the normal things like driving a car difficult. I was swerving around Coke cans in the street when I was driving (because of the fear of explosives)!"
The Iraq and Afghan vets are still just a fraction of the nearly 200,000 veterans who are homeless on any given night. But they are not being stigmatized the way the Vietnam vets were.
"It's a very different climate from the post-Vietnam days," said Rosanne Haggerty, president of Common Ground. "There is broad consensus that we should be helping the soldiers."